The National Road has long since lost its importance as the great connecting link of East and West. But in its day, especially before 1860, it was a teeming thoroughfare. Its course was lined with hospitable farmhouses and was dotted with fast-growing villages and towns. Some of the latter which once were nationally famed were left high and dry by later shifts of the lines of traffic, and have quite disappeared from the map. Throughout the spring and summer months there was a steady westward stream of emigrants; hardly a day failed to bring before the observer's eye the creaking canvas-covered wagon of the homeseeker. Singly and in companies they went, ever toward the promised land. Wagon-trains of merchandise from the eastern markets toiled patiently along the way. Speculators, peddlers, and sightseers added to the procession, and in hundreds of farmhouses the women-folk and children gathered in interested groups by the evening fire to hear the chance visitor talk politics or war and retail with equal facility the gossip of the next township and that of Washington or New York. Great stage-coach lines—the National Road Stage Company, the Ohio National Stage Company, and others—advertised the advantages of their services and sought patronage with all the ingenuity of the modern railroad. Taverns and roadhouses of which no trace remains today offered entertainment at any figure, and of almost any character, that the customer desired. Eastward flowed a steady stream of wagon-trains of flour, tobacco, and pork, with great droves of cattle and hogs to be fattened for the Philadelphia or Baltimore markets.
At almost precisely the same time that the first shovelful of earth was turned for the Cumberland Road, people dwelling on the banks of the upper Ohio were startled by the spectacle of a large boat moving majestically down stream entirely devoid of sail, oar, pole, or any other visible means of propulsion or control. This object of wonderment was the New Orleans, the first steamboat to be launched on western waters.
The conquest of the steamboat was speedy and complete. Already in 1819 there were sixty-three such craft on the Ohio, and in 1834—when the total shipping tonnage of the Atlantic seaboard was 76,064, and of the British Empire 82,696—the tonnage afloat on the Ohio and Mississippi was 126,278. Vessels regularly ascended the navigable tributaries of the greater streams in quest of cargoes, and while craft of other sorts did not disappear, the great and growing commerce of the river was revolutionized.
In the upbuilding of steamboat navigation the thriving, bustling, boastful spirit of the West found ample play. Steamboat owners vied with one another in adorning their vessels with bowsprits, figureheads, and all manner of tinseled decorations, and in providing elegant accommodations for passengers; engineers and pilots gloried in speed records and challenged one another to races which ended in some of the most shocking steamboat disasters known to history. The unconscious bombast of an anonymous Cincinnati writer in Timothy Flint's Western Monthly Review in 1827 gives us the real flavor of the steamboat business on the threshold of the Jacksonian era:
An Atlantic cit, who talks of us under the name of backwoodsmen, would not believe, that such fairy structures of oriental gorgeousness and splendor as the Washington, the Florida, the Walk in the Water, The Lady of the Lake, etc., etc., had ever existed in the imaginative brain of a romancer, much less, that they were actually in existence, rushing down the Mississippi, as on the wings of the wind, or plowing up between the forests, and walking against the mighty current "as things of life," bearing speculators, merchants, dandies, fine ladies, everything real, and everything affected, in the form of humanity, with pianos, and stocks of novels, and cards, and dice, and flirting, and love-making, and drinking, and champagne, and on the deck, perhaps, three hundred fellows, who have seen alligators, and neither fear whiskey, nor gun-powder. A steamboat, coming from New Orleans, brings to the remotest villages of our streams, and the very doors of the cabins, a little Paris, a section of Broadway, or a slice of Philadelphia, to ferment in the minds of our young people, the innate propensity for fashions and finery.… Cincinnati will soon be the centre of the "celestial empire," as the Chinese say; and instead of encountering the storms, the seasickness, and dangers of a passage from the Gulf of Mexico to the Atlantic, whenever the Erie Canal shall be completed, the opulent southern planters will take their families, their dogs and parrots, through a world of forests, from New Orleans to New York, giving us a call by the way. When they are more acquainted with us, their voyage will often terminate here. ¹
The new West was frankly materialistic. Yet its interests were by no means restricted to steamboats, turnpikes, crops, exports, and money-making. It concerned itself much with religion. One of the most familiar figures on trail and highway was the circuit-rider, with his Bible and saddlebags; and no community was so remote, or so hardened, as not to be raised occasionally to a frenzy of religious zeal by the crude but terrifying eloquence of the revivalist. For education, likewise, there was a growing regard. Nowhere did the devotion of the Western people to the twin ideas of democracy and enlightenment find nobler expression than in the clause of the Indiana constitution of 1816 making it the duty of the Legislature to provide for "a general system of education, ascending in a regular gradation from township schools to a state university, wherein tuition shall be gratis, and equally open to all." This principle found general application throughout the Northwest. By 1830 common schools existed wherever population was sufficient to warrant the expense; academies and other secondary schools were springing up in Cincinnati, Louisville, St. Louis, and many lesser places; state universities existed in Ohio and Indiana; and Baptists, Methodists, and Presbyterians had begun to dot the country with small colleges. Literature developed slowly. But newspapers appeared almost before there were readers; and that the new society was by no means without cultural, and even æsthetic, aspiration is indicated by the long-continued rivalry of Cincinnati and Lexington, Kentucky, to be known as "the Athens of the West."